A little History

It use to just be called Exchange, and was originally developed by iThemes. However, they were trimming the fat in 2017 and decided that Exchange didn’t fit their product focus, so they worked something out with AJ Morris and he took it over as ExchangeWP.

Unfortunately, the decision we were faced with is that we can no longer continue to run ExchangeWP. We have tried many ways to keep ExchangeWP going, but we are out of options at this point.

This post is purely my observation not facts. I have not spoken to Morris and have no idea what went on behind the senes, however, there are some things that came to mind as I pondered the situation after receiving that email.

Was This a Missed Opportunity?

By missed opportunity I mean, did they blow an opportunity to kill it in the WordPress e-commerce plugin space?

Let me first say that I understand that running a business is hard and it can be costly. Especially when you’re dealing with software and the need to provide support for a large user base. I don’t want to diminish the value of anything Morris and his team did and/or attempted to do with the take over of Exchange.

Morris showed true entrepreneurship. He took a risk and I am sure he did his best.

According to the email this is where the money went:

We quickly hired some contractors to help us with support and some simple migration work. We took on building all of our automated processes, putting together a shopping cart and so forth. We even spent money on marketing, lawyers and everything we needed to get the business up and running.

Without really knowing all the facts, and what was required to move the plugin from the iThemes ecosystem to the ExchangeWP ecosystem, to run out of runway in 7ish months, seems like a lot of money might have been needed for the migration.

I’d be interested to know what kind of “marketing” they did. I got two emails in the 7ish month timeframe. The first, stating that ExchangeWP was live, and the second, stating they ran out of money.

How many new plugin licenses did you sell with your marketing since taking over and how much was residual from iThemes exposure?

Here are a few other questions I have…

Why wasn’t there more leveraging of the iThemes audience. Did you run FB ads to target the iThemes followers to inform and promote?

Why didn’t I see ads on Facebook as a “fan” of WooCommerce FB page, promoting Exchange as a lightweight, simpler, alternative to WooCommerce?

Positioning it as a competitor for those of us that prefer to not use WooCommerce, but limited in options since it’s really the only complete solution in the space. Unless you know about ExchangeWP!

Why does their Twitter account only have 11 tweets and 25 followers? The iThemes Exchange Twitter account has 470 followers. They didn’t even go follow those 470 Twitter followers to get them to move over to the new Twitter account.

Facebook only has 7 likes? Why wasn’t I invited to like the page as a paid subscriber?

I believe it was a missed opportunity to go head to head with WooCommerce and deliver another solid plugin to the space, but again this is simply based on my outsider observations.

I don’t think the opportunity is over. Now that it’s open source, there is still a chance to build a community of users and dev supporters that can make ExchangeWP a solid performer and as common a name as WooCommerce when people think e-commerce plugins for WordPress.

But with it being open source, there are no revenues to support the dedication and motivation most need to drive a product to success.

Why did I spend the time thinking and writing on this?

I believe ExchangeWP could be a powerful competitor to WooCommerce. And maybe now that it is complete free and open, it can be stronger, but it needs someone that can grow the community. Open source communities don’t just happen because something is labeled “open source”.

If this open source community works, then I’d expect to see a wave of new service based providers, building business around WordPress and ExchangeWP.